I was born, baptized, and raised in a Roman Catholic household in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the South Side of Chicago. For my first six years there, that fact was merely a bit of personal trivia about me, like my being able to read well, run fast, and throw accurately. The only impact being a baptized Catholic had on my precocious awareness of certain existential mysteries is that it implied that I’d learn the Answers when I was old enough to attend Our Lady of the Gardens, the local Catholic elementary school

Predictably, once I was enrolled at OLG, I learned that the Answer to all of my existential questions was God. God is why there is something rather than nothing. God is how the universe came to be. Of course, God exists. God explicitly gave us free will. God’s ineffable Divine Will allows evil and suffering to exist in the world, often as a consequence of our God-given free will. Our intrinsic purpose is our contribution to God’s Divine Plan. There is life after death, in which our destinies are determined by how consistently our free will makes choices in harmony with God’s Will.

I was content with these simplistic answers until a fateful day in third grade. At OLG, we attended mass every school day, and obviously each Sunday. On this auspicious fall day, Father Z was delivering a sermon on gratitude. He was explaining that we should thank God for having created the world, the house we live in, our parents, our siblings, the food we eat, our favorite games and toys, and so on. As he droned on, The Question spontaneously popped into my head: “and what if He hadn’t?”

It sounds like such a benign question to my adult mind, but to the third-grader I was then, it knocked my world off its axis. My head spun with a dizziness that my high school self would describe as something akin to being high. My third grade self would later characterize it as resembling the enjoyable feeling I experienced after going on the Rotor Ride at the Riverview amusement park, or by whirling around until I could no longer walk straight.

I eventually noticed I was still sitting in our weekday mass. Lowering my head as though praying, I surreptitiously looked around at my classmates, and concluded that none of them appeared to have felt the world wobble. I quickly deduced that it was just me, and decided to test this hypothesis by simply asking a reformulated form of The Question (in retrospect I realize it was directed at my objective identity), “So, what if God has decided not to create the world?”

The dizziness returned with the same force as the first time, putting the lie to the assertion that you can never reproduce that “cherry high”. To me, this sensation had nothing but upside, so I spent much of the rest of mass and the next several days asking variations of, “what if the world didn’t exist?”, and enjoying the resulting buzz.

As a reasonably responsible Catholic boy, I eventually figured out that allowing my newfound abilities to distract me from by daily obligations would have potentially unpleasant consequences. Additionally, since I could summon this feeling of existential disorientation on demand—as my adult self would characterize it—I settled in to only asking The Question at quiet times, when I was free to think my own thoughts.

Needless to say, I never got around to actually asking The Question of the priests or nuns at OLG, or any members of my family, because the Catholic dogma included an implicit prohibition on such queries.

Over time, the frequency with which I triggered my existential disorientation declined from hundreds of times per month, to dozens of times per month, to monthly, to on the rare occasions that it occurred to me to do so. While the impact only waned slightly over the years, I eventually outgrew the need to indulge myself.

As my existential curiosity expanded, and other fundamental questions came to the fore, I grew from simply asking such questions to seeking their objective rational answers. This growth culminated in A Concise Theory of Truly Everything. A case could be made that experiencing so much controlled existential disorientation at such a young age made it possible for me to write this book.